The award was presented at the 2024 Esri Global User Conference, held in July in San Diego (USA), with 18,000 in-person attendees and approximately 20,000 online attendees. The two Vietnamese organizations surpassed thousands of nominations to reach the final round and were personally selected and honored by Mr. Jack Dangermond - President of Esri, Founder of Esri.

The Department of Surveying, Mapping and Geographic Information of Vietnam is a state organization under the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, performing state management and public services on surveying, mapping and geographic information. This unit was assigned by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment to organize and implement the project "Investing in building a national geographic database to serve the construction of a national geospatial data infrastructure and e-Government". Up to now, the Department has completed the construction of a national geographic database and established a national topographic map on land, and built a national geographic database on Vietnam's sea to serve the work of planning and socio-economic development. On June 24, the Department of Surveying, Mapping and Geographic Information sent a document to relevant ministries and branches to hand over ArcGIS Desktop Advance 10.8.2 software to serve the updating of the national geographic database. This is a step forward in applying ArcGIS to use, manage, operate and exploit the national geographic database in accordance with the direction of the Politburo and the Government.

Portcoast is a private company operating mainly in the field of seaport, maritime and inland waterway consulting. In recent years, Portcoast has been known as a leading company in the field of digital transformation of infrastructure. For many years, this enterprise has applied modern technologies such as laser scan, lidar, photogrammetry... to build digital models of the current status, applying building information modeling (BIM) for construction works and projects. In particular, the combination of building information modeling on the GIS platform has been applied by Portcoast to projects abroad, then applied to projects that Portcoast consults in Vietnam.

At the 2024 Esri Global User Conference, Portcoast awarded the Special Achievement Award to the project Surveying, documenting and building a digital model of the current status of inland waterway routes in Ho Chi Minh City. This is a large project, with a scale of more than 5,500 hectares of river surface area and more than 10,000 hectares of land along both sides of the rivers, including 82 inland waterway routes with a total length of 522.8 km. Along with that is the entire inland waterway signaling system, 217 bridges and culverts on the route, 200 high/medium/low voltage power lines crossing the river, 146 inland ports and wharves on the route. This project also marks the first time in Vietnam that modern survey technology and digitalization of data on inland waterway infrastructure have been applied. The entire inland waterway system of Ho Chi Minh City, including all works on the routes and the space on both banks of the waterways, is digitized on a single, online platform, integrating the building information model (BIM) and 3D geographic information system (GIS). According to Mr. Tran Phuc Minh Khoi, Director of Portcoast Digital Transformation Center, being honored and awarded a special achievement award by Esri is a great encouragement for Portcoast Consulting. This achievement not only affirms the correct orientation and implementation of the Party and Government's policy in widely applying GIS and digital technology, digital platforms in Vietnam, but also affirms Portcoast's technology application capacity to keep up with the world.